Welcome to the segment on “What type of paper should you write?” Right off the bat, your professor might dictate the type, and that will save you the trouble here. But there are a few fortunate students who get the privilege to choose for themselves! Here’s a brief guide on what each type of paper entails, and then you can choose whichever is most suitable for your research. By the way, we look forward to announcing the winner of the “Best Paper that will almost surely earn you an A.” It’s worth reading to the end.

Qualitative or Theoretical Research: 

Such a paper involves a lot of words. It’s essential to understand that you will have a lot to read, sift through, write, and very little time to rest. Each chapter in this work is based on extensive text, but not just any text—paragraph after paragraph where each integrates at least two articles, arranged in chronological order and in line with the previous paragraph, ultimately answering the sub-chapter, which answers the chapter, which answers the overall research question, which ties back to the topic. It’s kind of like a Matryoshka doll (we’re smart enough to know not to say Babushka).

One crucial aspect of this work is to maintain coherent and focused writing that does not deviate into other subjects. It can be a comparative study, for example, a paper comparing Kabbalistic Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism (yes, there are super interesting papers about this topic), or a historical paper discussing the factors that led to World War I (Franz Ferdinand would say it wasn’t his fault). There’s also theoretical research reviewing various financial reports and how they affect stock market fluctuations (our favorite topic). In general, a good theoretical paper focuses on the topic you chose and has high-quality writing that builds up your answer to the research question. We’ll now focus on another type of theoretical work, namely “Qualitative Research.”

Qualitative Research:

Essentially, papers dealing with comparisons or historical aspects could be considered qualitative research, but our intention here is to discuss research based on qualitative data like interviews. The reason we focus on interviews is that most of the data we’ve collected indicates that many papers are based on interview-driven research. We don’t know why, but you seem to love conducting interviews.

It’s important to understand that interviews are based on a quality literature review and also on creating a set of questions, whether structured or open-ended, in-depth questionnaires, semi-structured questionnaires, etc., where the responses to these questions produce a good alignment between the research question and our hypotheses. For instance, we decided to focus our research on African American women and their career trajectories. We’re curious about the challenges these educated women face when seeking employment after graduation. We hypothesize that these challenges may stem from systemic discrimination, societal expectations, early family responsibilities, and more.  To examine these challenges, we will prepare an interview in advance that we know will be good enough so that the interviewees’ responses will provide strong validation for our final answer in the discussion chapter of the paper. Sometimes we are not always sure we have the capacity or time to sit with people one-on-one to conduct interviews. Therefore, nothing is faster than distributing empirical questionnaires to 180 single men and women in New York to find out why they haven’t found a partner yet. Say hello to empirical research work.

Empirical Seminar Paper:

Or in other words, “Do I need to learn SPSS now?” The answer is yes, you need to know how to work with statistical inference software, but sometimes Excel can help with checking simple correlations (our little secret—Excel can create a decent statistical analysis for a quality research paper). But before you enter data into the software, you need to actually have data! The structure here is similar to before: a good research question based on quantifiable variables (even love and dating despair can be quantitatively measured), and a good literature review including various studies in the field (for example, what is late singleness? The challenges of finding a partner in the center versus the periphery, and more). However, unlike theoretical or qualitative works, here you’ll need to fill the remaining required pages with tables, which is great because it takes up space, but still requires a bit more precision and realistic thinking. So now all that’s left is for you to pray you get a high enough correlation to declare “The reason singles in New York can’t find partners is because they live in New York!” Even though almost everyone thinks that, at least you will have a table to prove it, and in SPSS! Nice, isn’t it?

And now, as promised, the results of the competition for the “Best Paper that will almost surely earn you an A”:

First place – Empirical research paper. Little prose, lots of data, little room for error and lack of focus.

Second place – Qualitative research paper based on interviews. Similar to empirical research, but here your interviewees have given you their words as a gift.

Third and last place – Theoretical seminar paper. We’re sorry to disappoint you. Although these can be very interesting to write, many students get lost and stray into various directions, and professors notice this, especially when you start with “This work will discuss the causes of the expulsion of the Jews of Spain” and end with “The conclusion is that the Jews of Spain should have obtained a Portuguese passport.” It doesn’t really flow.

And now, let’s talk about the magic of AI in the world of academia, especially in crafting theoretical papers. Enter RikiGPT, our trusty AI tool that’s been nothing short of revolutionary over the past year. Riki’s been busy at work, churning out hundreds of theoretical papers. The cool part? All these papers went through with high grades and glowing comments from graders, who had no clue it was RikiGPT writing it! This little secret highlights not only the power of artificial intelligence but also its seamless fit into the academic process. Students get to hone their critical thinking and analytical prowess, while RikiGPT handles the heavy lifting of data collection and draft preparation. This blend of technology and tradition is setting a new standard in academic research, proving that even in the digital age, theoretical work holds its ground and thrives, thanks to some help from our AI friends.